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	South African tragedy: Nearly 100 mental health patients die due to inadequate care by SABC, BBC, The Observer, agencies South Africa, United Kingdom   1 Feb. 2017   South African tragedy: Nearly 100 mental health patients die due to inadequate care. (AFP, SABC)   At least 94 patients with mental health issues died after South African authorities moved them from hospitals to unlicensed health facilities that were likened to concentration camps, a government investigation has revealed.   Many of the deaths were due to pneumonia, dehydration and diarrhoea as the patients were hurriedly moved to 27 “poorly prepared” facilities in a cost-cutting measure that showed evidence of neglect.   The health ombudsman report, which has sparked uproar, detailed how some patients were collected from the Life Esidimeni hospital in Gauteng province last year using open pickup trucks.   As the scandal broke, the provincial health minister, Qedani Mahlangu, resigned over the findings, which directly implicated her in the move.   According to the report, which was compiled after 80 hours of listening to family members and inspectors during the investigation – relatives were left in the dark over where the patients were, in unheated centres that some witnesses said were like concentration camps.   The centres also failed to provide seriously ill patients with enough food and water, leaving them severely malnourished, underweight and in some cases dying from dehydration.   Gauteng’s provincial health department had terminated its longstanding contract with the Life Esidimeni hospital and moved more than 1,300 patients to an “unstructured, unpredictable, substandard caring environment”, the report said.   “One person has died from a mental health-related illness. None of the 93 [others] have died from a mental illness,” the health ombudsman, Malegapuru Makgoba, told the media as the report was released.   Makgoba said the death toll was likely to rise as investigations continued into the scandal.   The report pointed towards the neglect that led to the deaths being caused by profit-seeking. The 27 healthcare centres “were mysteriously and poorly selected” and were “unable to distinguish between the highly specialised non-stop professional care requirements … and a business opportunity”, it said.   * SABC: http://bit.ly/2kUjDZW http://www.ohsc.org.za/index.php/news/media-releases/129-report-into-deaths-of-mentally-ill-patients-gauteng-province-3   Jan. 2017   Calls for increased funding for hospitals and social care as patients die in UK. (The Observer)   The National Health Service (NHS) in England is facing a “humanitarian crisis” as hospitals and ambulance services struggle to keep up with rising demand, the British Red Cross has said, following the deaths of two patients after long waits on trolleys in hospital corridors.   Worcestershire Royal hospital launched an investigation into the deaths and did not deny reports that they had occurred after long waits on trolleys in corridors over the new year period. On Friday, doctors’ leaders said more patients could die because of the chaos engulfing the NHS.   The deaths prompted claims that the health service was “broken”, and long waits for care, chronic bed shortages and staff shortages were leading towards what the head of Britain’s Accident and Emergency (A&E) doctors called “untold patient misery”, due to lack of adequate Government funding.   Mike Adamson, chief executive of the British Red Cross, said his organisation was “on the front line”. He said: "We are responding to the humanitarian crisis in our hospital and ambulance services across the country. We have been called in to support the NHS and help get people home from hospital and free up much needed beds. This means deploying our team of emergency volunteers and even calling on our partner Land Rover to lend vehicles to transport patients and get the system moving.”   It is believed that one woman died of a heart attack after waiting for 35 hours on a trolley in a corridor, and another man suffered an aneurysm while on a trolley, and could not be saved.   Worcestershire Royal hospital, admitted that it was under serious pressure, partly as a result of the extra strain hospitals face during winter. Many other patients who visited Worcestershire Royal hospital this week told news agencies of long waits in A&E, corridors lined with patients, and overstretched staff doing their best to cope.   Dr Mark Holland, the president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said: “For a long time we have been saying that the NHS is on the edge. But people dying after long spells in hospital corridors shows that the NHS is now broken.   “We have got to the point where the efforts of staff to prop up the system are no longer enough to keep the system afloat. We are asking NHS staff to provide a first class service, but with third world levels of staffing and third world levels of beds.   “That so many other hospitals in England are facing the same pressures as the one in Worcester means that other fatalities could occur. I would suggest that the same thing could happen in other hospitals, because lots of hospitals are under the same pressures.”   It is also possible that mainly frail elderly patients admitted to hospital over the festive period may have died because they received inadequate care on wards where staff were ill-equipped to deal with their conditions, Holland added. He could not estimate how many may have died as a result.   Fifty of England’s 152 NHS acute hospital trusts were forced to declare an alert last month, and sometimes temporarily scale back the level of care they offered to patients, because they could not cope with the number of people seeking medical attention, according to analysis by the Nuffield Trust health thinktank. Every hospital in Essex has had to go on “black alert” – the NHS’s highest level – in recent weeks.   In December, seven trusts had to declare the highest level of emergency 15 times, meaning they were unable to give patients comprehensive care. Paramedics have told the Guardian they have had to wait for up to eight hours at a time outside A&E units to discharge a patient into the care of hospital staff, because emergency departments cannot accept any more admissions, thereby lengthening 999 response times.   Dr Taj Hassan, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said figures it obtained from hospitals across the UK showed some were treating as little as 50%-60% of A&E patients within four hours, far below the required 95% target.   “Figures cannot account for untold patient misery,” he said. “Overcrowded departments, overflowing with patients, can result in avoidable deaths.” Hassan and Holland blamed the government’s underfunding of the NHS and social care systems for contributing to hospitals problems.   “The emergency care system is on its knees, despite the huge efforts of staff who are struggling to cope with the intense demands being put upon them. The situation is intolerable for both staff and patients,” said Hassan, who is an A&E consultant at two hospitals in Leeds.   http://www.channel4.com/news/are-mortality-rates-affected-by-nhs-cuts   * London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, University of Oxford: 30,000 Excess deaths in 2015 may be linked to failures in health and social care: http://bit.ly/2llkNhD   Jan 2017   British Red Cross says there is a "humanitarian crisis" in hospitals in England. (BBC News)   Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn urged Prime Minister Theresa May to tell the country how she would fix the "national scandal" of the NHS. Mr Corbyn said: "The fact is, this government have repeatedly failed to put the necessary resources into our health service, while they have cut social care and wasted billions on a top-down reorganisation to accelerate privatisation."   It comes as a third of hospital trusts in England warned they struggled to cope with patient last month. Figures show that 42 accident and emergency departments ordered ambulances to divert to other hospitals last week - double the number during the same period in 2015.   Diversions can only happen when a department is under significant pressure, such as lacking the capacity to take more patients or having queues of ambulances outside for significantly prolonged periods, and when all existing plans to deal with a surge in patients have been unsuccessful.   The Royal College of Emergency Medicine said staff were under intense pressure, while the Society for Acute Medicine warned this month could be the worst January the NHS had ever faced.   Dr Mark Holland, told BBC Breakfast: "We have been predicting that we would face a winter from hell. I think that time has arrived."   Professor Keith Willett, national director for acute episodes of care at NHS England, admitted demand was at its highest level ever and staff were under "a level of pressure we haven''t seen before".   Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust said on Friday that it was investigating two deaths at Worcestershire Royal Hospital''s A&E department in the last week. A patients watchdog has called for an investigation.   John Freeman said his wife Pauline, who is recovering from a stroke, spent 38 hours on a trolley at the same hospital because of overcrowding. "There was probably in excess of 20 trolleys all stacked up. This is going back to the dark ages almost."   Trusts around the country are taking to social media to urge patients to stay away from A&E, unless it is an emergency or a life-threatening illness.   The British Red Cross Chief executive Mike Adamson said: "The British Red Cross is on the front line, responding to the humanitarian crisis in our hospital and ambulance services across the country.. We have been called in to support the National Health Service and help get people home from hospital and free up much needed beds.   "We''ve seen people sent home without clothes; some suffer falls and are not found for days, while others are not washed because there is no carer there to help them."   Speaking to the BBC, Mr Corbyn said it was "unprecedented" for the government to be criticised by the Red Cross, which he said was "essentially a volunteer organisation".   He said there was a "crisis" both in social care and hospital funding which needed to be dealt with "urgently".   "It needs government intervention now," he said. "We have health care as a human right in this country - that''s what the NHS is for. The NHS needs the money now in order to care for people."   http://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/06/nhs-faces-humanitarian-crisis-rising-demand-british-red-cross http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/07/observer-view-on-nhs-crisis http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/18/the-observer-view-local-services-budget-cuts http://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network http://www.opendemocracy.net/ournhs http://www.jrf.org.uk/solve-uk-poverty   * Grenfell Fire Tragedy: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/16/grenfell-tower-price-britain-inequality-high-rise http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/16/theresa-may-scared-grenfell-survivors-finished-austerity-cameron-osborne http://inequality.org/great-divide/london-fire-fuels-movement-tackle-inequality-britain/ Visit the related web page
	Open Government Partnership undermined by threats to civil society by CIVICUS Monitor, agencies   December 2016   People’s rights to protest, organise and speak out are currently being significantly violated in 25 of the 68 active Open Government Partnership (OGP) countries, according to the CIVICUS Monitor, an online tool to track and compare civic freedoms on a global scale.   The new tool launched in October by the global civil society alliance CIVICUS rates countries based on how well they uphold civic space, made up of three fundamental rights that enable people to act collectively and make change: freedom of association, freedom of peaceful assembly, and freedom of expression.   The OGP brings together governments and civil society with the shared aim of making governments more transparent, accountable and responsive to their citizens.   OGP countries make multiple commitments relating to civil society and public participation, which include consulting with civil society and enabling citizens to input on policy.   Of the 68 active OGP countries, the CIVICUS Monitor finds that civic space in four - Colombia, Honduras, Liberia and Mexico - is repressed, which means that those who criticise power holders risk surveillance, harassment, intimidation, imprisonment, injury and death. Civic space is also rated as repressed in Azerbaijan and Turkey, both recently declared ‘inactive’ by the OGP’s steering committee.   In the past six months, the CIVICUS Monitor has documented a wide variety of attacks on civil society in these four countries, ranging from the assassinations of five social leaders in just one week in Colombia, to the police’s use of tear gas and water cannons to disperse student protests in Honduras, and from the four-hour detention and questioning of a newspaper editor in Liberia to the murder of a community radio journalist in Mexico.   A further 21 OGP countries are rated obstructed, meaning that space for activism is heavily contested through a combination of legal and practical constraints on the full enjoyment of fundamental freedoms.   Other commitments on civic participation and civic space that OGP countries make include releasing and improving the provision of information relating to civic participation; bringing in or including citizens in oversight mechanisms to monitor government performance; and improving legal and institutional mechanisms to strengthen civil society capabilities to promote an enabling environment for participation.   “The existence of significant restrictions on civil society in more than a third of OGP countries is deeply troubling and calls into question their commitment to the principle of empowering citizens upon which the OGP was founded,” said Cathal Gilbert, lead researcher on the CIVICUS Monitor.   “OGP countries should be harnessing the potential of public participation in governance, rather than silencing government critics and harassing human rights defenders.”   Of the remaining OGP countries, civic space in 31 is rated as narrowed. A total of 12 countries are rated as open, which means that the state safeguards space for civil society and encourages platforms for dialogue.   Positively, no OGP countries fall into the CIVICUS Monitor’s closed category.   “Notably, OGP countries as a group fare better than the rest of the globe on civic space,” said Gilbert. “However, much more needs to be done collectively to ensure that commitments on public participation made by OGP countries in their national development plans are carried through.”   As heads of state and government, members of parliament, academia, business and civil society representatives meet at the OGP Summit in Paris, France, CIVICUS urges delegates to focus discussions on best practices to improve civic space conditions in OGP countries.   http://www.civicus.org/index.php/media-resources/media-releases/2664-open-government-partnership-undermined-by-threats-to-civil-society http://monitor.civicus.org/ http://gpsaknowledge.org/ http://www.opengovpartnership.org/ http://www.protectdefenders.eu/en/newsfeed.html#newsletter-article-75 http://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2017   A free and diverse media is essential to protecting Democracy in the 21st Century, says Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, Secretary-General of CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance.   Images of protestors flooding the streets – whether in Caracas, Bucharest, Istanbul or Washington DC – send a powerful message to those in power, especially when they are plastered across newspaper front pages.   In far too many countries, the response has been to shut down the space for citizens to organise and undermine the ability for dissent to be reported.   Even in the most mature of democracies, the ability of citizens to organise and mobilise, and the freedom of journalists to report when they do, are being undermined.   In an era of rising populism and spreading curbs on fundamental freedoms, we need to do more to protect civic rights and press freedom.   When people hit the streets to express dissent, headlines are not always guaranteed. In some countries, journalists risk imprisonment, disappearance or death for reporting on voices of dissent.   In other places, the few powerful interests that control mainstream media channels are in cahoots and play down the scale or importance of protest. And the world over, independent and smaller media outlets – that are critical to diverse media – are struggling to stay afloat.   The first, and most worrying reason why protests don’t make the nightly news is because in many countries around the world journalists who cover protests are putting themselves at risk.   In countries where civic participation is restricted or closed, journalists, like activists, risk losing their jobs, their freedom and even their lives reporting on protests.   According to the CIVICUS Monitor attacks on journalists are one of the three most commonly reported violations of civic space, alongside the detention of human rights defenders and the use of excessive force during protests.   The Monitor, which measures the openness of civic space in 195 countries, found that journalists are most often attacked as a result of their political reporting on protests, conflict reporting, and for exposing government corruption.   Civil society and media exist in an ecosystem where attacks on one are likely to have an impact on the other. Where human rights defenders and civil society organisations find their freedoms under threat, so to do journalists. Policing media coverage is just one of the ways that governments close or repress civic space.   While social media and citizen journalists and bloggers have made it more difficult for mainstream media outlets to ignore mass demonstrations, some media outlets actively seek to undermine the renewed interest they generate.   Media Matters for America, a monitoring agency, has recorded repeated instances of corporate media in the United States making false claims, such as that protests are staged or protestors are paid. Instead of interviewing citizens participating in the marches, cable news programs turn to their usual group of pundits for comment.   For example, after the recent Science March, some cable television shows hosted panels featuring climate change deniers and no actual scientists.   In some cases journalists have forgotten that the voices of ordinary citizens, are just as important, if not more important, than the voices of powerful politicians and wealthy elites.   And even where journalists do seek to quote representatives from civil society they too often turn to the same narrow set of voices for comment, since smaller non-governmental organisations often lack the media resources of larger international organisations.   Another important reason why journalists do not cover protests is because they do not have the resources to do so. The economic pressures on commercial media are also harming press freedom. Independent, diverse media often lack the financial resources of media owned by wealthy corporations or governments with their own political agendas. Many media outlets now rely on donations or membership models to survive.   All of these restrictions have led many activists to turn to reporting on protests themselves. Some of the most powerful journalism now comes from citizen bloggers, often providing invaluable news from closed political spaces and behind the battle lines.   As the boundaries between citizen and professional journalists blur it is becoming increasingly important to protect the space for all of those people who seek to inform, expose and educate.   Whether it is protestors, journalists, civil society organisations, human rights defenders, or climate scientists we need to protect the ability for people to be able to express dissent. And we need to stand together.   Without journalists, scientists marching in the street, would not be able to be able to share their messages with the world. Without photojournalists, vast underestimates of crowd sizes from officials may continue to be used to undermine popular movements.   Asking questions, speaking truth to power, shining a light on corruption. These simple actions carry increased risks in 2017, as powerful elites seek to cement their positions of power. In this febrile political environment, civic space and press freedom feel more important than ever. Visit the related web page
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